Oh Jesus Christ.

The real goal isn't for Alacrity or Kitty or WezTerm or any other terminal to use libghostty. I think over the long term, terminal emulator user bases dwindle down to niche (but important) use cases.

The real goal is for higher-level tooling (GUI or browser) that utilizes terminal-like programs to have something like libghostty to reach for. I think this represents the much, much larger ecosystem out there that likely touches many more people. For example, Neovim's terminal mode, terminal multiplexers, PaaS build systems, agentic tooling, etc. You're seeing this emerge in force already with the awesome-libghostty repo.

libghostty would still be useful for traditional terminal emulators to replatform on, and for example xterm.js is seriously looking into it (and I'm happy to help and even offered their maintainer a maintainer spot on libghostty). But, they're not the goal. And if fragile egos hold people back, it's really not my problem, it's theirs.

The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs make this all way less painful... even though they're not trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs, and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.

I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been good.

I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and the leadership. All good.

If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.

So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.

First, libghostty is _way more exciting_ nowadays. It is already backing more than a dozen terminal projects that are free and commercial: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty I think this is the real future of Ghostty and I've said this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders.

On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time.

Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.

Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time).

That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.

I think you're looking for the `toggle_split_zoom` binding which has existed since Ghostty 1.0 and is default bound to `cmd+shift+enter` on macOS which is the same binding as iTerm. It's also visible in the menu and command palette.

We recently added a kind of split title bar, making it double click to zoom is a good idea. I'll add an issue for that to the roadmap.

Its just a layer to minimize noise.